Doctor Who: The BBC Books #126 – Blue Box by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#59

Blue Box

By Kate Orman

Oh, blast. This is the last Kate Orman Doctor Who novel, not including audiobooks and a Telos novella. It’s the end of an era.

How fitting that she did something different with this one. Not, I’m sure, that she sat down and thought “This will be my last Who book”, but since things worked out that way I’m glad that Blue Box has its own USP.

It’s first person. Yes, another one of those – they’re practically breeding these days what with Eye Of Heaven, Tomb Of Valdemar and The Infinity Race. Blue Box is presented as a non-fiction novel similar to Who Killed Kennedy, written by Australian journalist “Charles ‘Chick’ Peters”. Because of its Earth-bound authorship there is a certain distance around the Sixth Doctor and Peri, whose time-and-space travelling is never exactly confirmed, nor their conveyance seen. (“[Peri] is a little vague about exactly where she has been with the Doctor. But it’s obvious they’ve travelled the globe many times over, usually off the beaten path, more likely to stay in a hut than the Hilton.”)

Blue Box is a cyber-crime thriller set in 1981, which immediately adds another flavour. The internet (it’s not called that here) and email are still new things; characters often note that cyber-crime is too new for the authorities to even get a handle on. This might seem an odd period for a story largely concerned with malware but Orman makes a compelling case for it, with one character observing that “at the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head.” That proprietorial sense drives the villain, Sarah Swan: she wants to control it all, put her stamp on it, which actually seems possible at this time. There’s an intimacy to the plot, a tug-of-war/road trip across America, that there might not have been in a world of broadband and high-speed downloads. Only the small band of heroes and Sarah seem to exist; computers might as well be their personal playground, a realm only they know.

Make no mistake, this is a nerdy book, full of detail and ephemera that says “80s computers.” Orman even plays some kind of game with the chapter numbering, going “(10) One/Two/Three/Four/(20) One” etc, which I’ve no doubt means something in computer-ese. There are enough sympathetic “Huh?”s from Peri and Chick that it never runs away from the reader however, and the Doctor (this incarnation rarely being one for understatement) makes it clear that the stakes could mean the end of life on Earth. It’s good that we have these little yardstick moments because, as above, the plot is rather low-key: a hunt for alien objects in which we scarcely see the aliens or the objects, and their dangerous effects are largely just hinted at until the end. This is perhaps a feature (bug?) of the non-fiction novel gag, as Chick Peters simply can’t know everything – frankly I wondered at how much he was able to surmise, but then you have to allow a certain amount of wiggle room in Doctor Who. We’re not doing a fictionalised All The President’s Men here.

Orman (and to be fair Jon Blum, usually in the mix whether credited or otherwise) is a wonder at character-writing and there’s plenty of that in Blue Box. The minor characters have enough colour to stand out, particularly Bob Salmon, a programmer who once helped the Doctor in an off-screen adventure. (His later run-in with his dad following a trespassing incident sells their relationship fast.) Chick meanwhile is a compelling narrator/occasional hero with a surprising amount of story arc to put away, the specifics of which would have been rare to see in fiction circa 2003, even more so in 1981. (The way things are going with culture wars we might slide back that way, unfortunately.) His line of work and general gumshoe ethos also leads to some of the more eyebrow-raising language to be found in a Doctor Who story: he comes across the n-word once, the f-slur a few times, and then there’s this saying – admittedly less actually offensive than just WTF – that I’ve seen and now, fair’s fair, you have to as well: “The moment Bob gave us the all-clear, Luis was up the stairs like a raped ape.” Chick isn’t a hateful guy and I’m not trying to cancel Kate Orman here, I just thought it was worth mentioning with such a genial author and a fairly contained and nerdy setting it’s shall we say surprising to see these kinds of choices. Perhaps it was to toughen up a generally sweet writing style. (Mind you, wasn’t Orman the first New Adventures author to include the f-word?) Insert standard They Wouldn’t Publish It These Days disclaimer here.

The villain is also interesting. Sarah (a female villain, unusual already) is a force to be reckoned with, single-minded and mean, but she’s still extremely human and not out to take over the world – she just wants to control her little bit of it. This is all just a happy accident for Sarah and she’s just seeing how far it can take her; as the Doctor notes re the dangerous artefact, “She doesn’t know what to do with it! She’s asking us!” She regards her pursuers with an uneasy neutrality at first, occasionally considering working with them rather than against: “They’re good, Luis, really good for a change. We’ve been playing cat and mouse for days and I’m not sure whether I’m the cat or the mouse.” Our first sight of her is in the aftermath of the adventure, her mind now damaged by what happened, so there’s an underlying sympathy for her right away – a smart in-universe writing choice by Chick – that helps temper some of her smaller and nastier impulses later on. Blue Box really does feel like an unfortunate mistake that got out of hand, which adds an unusual tension for a Doctor Who book, that of containing a disaster to a handful of flawed people rather than summoning UNIT to shoot at them.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between Blue Box and the rest of Orman’s oeuvre is her choice of Doctor. Orman (and Blum, etc) was known at this point for pushing along the Eighth Doctor Adventures, adding crucial depth to Sam Jones in particular. Vampire Science, Seeing I and Unnatural History were load-bearing books. It’s surprising then to find her in the lower-stakes world of the Past Doctor Adventures. What can she do here? Well, broadly the answer to that is “have some nerdy fun with computers.” But there is also a significant stake in the choice of this Doctor and this companion.

She captures the Sixth Doctor brilliantly, but also in her own way. There are so many quintessentially good bits, here’s a random selection: “He spoke in a crisp English accent, with relish, as though just pronouncing words was a pleasure in itself.” / “He takes up a lot of space, not just because he’s a big man: he moves around a lot, he fills the air with words and gestures. He’s the focal point of any room he’s in.” / “The Doctor is the smartest person I know. I have a lot of respect for him. The problem is, he’s also the smartest person he knows.” / “I dipped a hand into the nearest pocket of the coat, hoping for some ID, and instead fished out a dog-eared Roget’s Thesaurus.”

It’s worth noting that Orman writes him more sombrely than usual – not just confined plot-wise to a world of typing commands into a computer, which traditionally doesn’t involve a lot of grand gestures, but even dressing him down into a black suit to attract less attention. He has moments of quiet consideration that lean more towards his successor’s style, such as his dark mission statement to Chick that “there must be a world for Peri to come back home to.” He still has his usual smugness and pomposity, particularly when trying (and failing!) to be diplomatic with Sarah, but his general machinations and game-playing keep him away from opportunities for blustery arguments, as well as seeming generally more like Seventh Doctor-isms. (Perhaps I’m projecting because I’ve read Orman’s Virgin books. Either way, they are Doctor-isms.)

Orman does most of her character work with Peri. She is keen to highlight Peri’s strength of character, having her for instance be the only advocate for an alien cyber-being that poses a threat to the whole world: “Whatever that little alien guy can do, it’s still a living, breathing creature. It’s got rights.” But Orman also pounces on the duo’s combative relationship, which often makes me wonder (during telly rewatches) why the hell Peri sticks around: “[The Doctor and Peri] spent a lot of their time in half-hearted bickering, usually when one of them made some stupid mistake. He burnt dinner, she got lost, he couldn’t steer, she got attacked by some animal. This time it was the Doctor’s turn to screw up. They were supposed to be visiting her family but the Doctor had got them there at the wrong time, messing up her reunion plans.” / “‘You and I have both seen more of life than either Bob or Peri. Their enthusiasm and idealism hasn’t been worn down against the grindstone of time.’ I wasn’t so sure about Peri’s enthusiasm, but I held my tongue.”

Blue Box seems hellbent on answering that question. Chick asks her about it, indirectly at first, then head on: “‘You like him, don’t you?’ The smile pinched its way back onto her face. ‘Yeah I do. He can be a pain in the ass, but he’s a lot of fun to be around.’” / “‘Why do you even want to stay together?’ Peri’s voice grew small. ‘There was a time when he got really, really sick, and I had no idea what to do. I should have made him get help, but I just panicked. I guess in a small way I’m still making that up to him.’” The guilt complex angle is interesting, but that only seems to be part of it; as the book progresses she has more agency in wanting to stay here. “‘I want to be here. No, that’s not right.’ Something was dawning in her face. ‘I don’t want to be here. This is all wrong. I want to be wherever the Doctor is. Wherever he goes.’” / “She looked more relaxed than she had since I first met her, and not only because the crisis was over: she had made up her mind about where she wanted to be.” I’m not entirely convinced that Orman’s impassioned writing for Peri would work slotted between her TV episodes, but read in isolation it’s lovely to see it thought about this much. Given all the trenches Orman and Blum dug to justify Sam Jones it makes sense to see her head-canoning to remove a few stinging nettles from the Saward era.

Blue Box is still not what I’d call a character-driven story as all that (wonderful) Sixth Doctor and Peri stuff is happening alongside the plot rather than driving it. That’s hardly a problem though: it chunters along quite happily as a tech-thriller, with the Doctor and co. and Sarah moving in ever decreasing circles until a (characteristically sly and mostly off-screen) final battle resolves the matter. It’s a strikingly small story which speaks quaintly to the time it’s set in, such as a moment where hacker Bob says of the hypothetical internet “It’ll work as long as everyone in the world doesn’t get a computer.” (Sorry, Bob.) The first person/non-fiction novel style is clever without being obtrusive, and just about believable within its constraints, allowing for little bits of flair like the suggestive dreams in the prologue and epilogue. Crucially it feels like a human story despite its special interest in computers, finding sympathy in Sarah’s downfall and expressing a very human bafflement at the indifference of the aliens, whose limited and disguised appearances keep them unknowable. (Even the “alien” at the centre of all this, “a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed Sesame Street monster,” draws an obvious human allusion as it sits there quietly obsessing with puzzles rather than making eye contact.) The focus is not after all on “the great green and black void” of computers but on the people using them, the connections they might otherwise struggle to make and the vulnerabilities that can create.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #125 – The Domino Effect by David Bishop

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#62

The Domino Effect

By David Bishop

Right then. What happened here?

 

The EDAs are once again doing an arc. Time Zero told us in no uncertain terms that Earth’s timeline had gone wrong. Anji specifically could not go home until this was sorted. The gang followed their only lead to hunt Sabbath — agent provocateur of this crisis — on an alien planet. That bit resolved, they then headed back to Earth.

 

Pop quiz: how is Earth’s timeline doing? Is everything ready for Anji to go home? The Infinity Race had, at best, one line towards the end suggesting that this might be the case. I’m not sure why an entirely separate attempt by Sabbath to Make Time Work Like What I Want It To, on an alien planet no less, would have any effect — but sure, why not hope for the best. Even so it’s an unproven theory.

 

Enter The Domino Effect, in which Anji decides on arrival that Edinburgh 2003 is close enough to be getting on with and once more bids the TARDIS farewell. The Doctor and Fitz are sad but they acquiesce. No one wonders if this is the right version of Earth.

 

Uh, guys? The arc?

 

Oh, Anji spots some anomalies. Her money doesn’t seem to be legal tender any more. Her friend’s business doesn’t exist. There are no computers or signs of advanced technology beyond the 1950s. And the British Empire still seems to be a thing, whereas the concept of a Pakistani-descended Londoner is (quite racistly) not. Anji’s conclusion? These individual people must be crazy! I’m sure if I keep asking I’ll find the normal Edinburgh at some point! I’ll keep trying to pay for things with the same money! Meanwhile the Doctor has holed up in a library to look for clues as to what’s going on here, because something’s definitely not right. In time he realises that a sinister plot has distorted the history of Earth.

 

I feel like I’m going insane. Did they forget to tell David Bishop about the arc? Timelines in flux was literally Earth’s status quo the last time we were there. Incorrect money was a signifier of this! The Domino Effect, with its entirely separate What If Time Went Wonky plot, reads like Bishop was handed “Earth’s history goes wrong so Anji can’t stay there” and thought, okay chief, I’ll write that, instead of following it. Reading these in sequence the main trio’s utter failure to join the dots makes them seem like they’ve had a memory wipe, or worse, like they just aren’t that bright. (And yes, this appears to be an unrelated crisis to the first one so the dots wouldn’t join — but they’d still notice the similarity, surely?) It’s a baffling editorial choice that somehow ends in The Domino Effect rebooting its own version of the arc from scratch. Hopefully someone told the next author that we’re all good now, the arc has started, please just do the next bit, or never mind infinite Earths – we’ll have infinite bloody arcs on our hands.

 

While it adds unnecessary confusion for the constant EDA reader there is still something to be said for The Domino Effect working as a standalone novel/jumping on point. The basic setup of a world gone wrong hadn’t yet been done to death in Doctor Who, with Inferno being the main offender. There’s an excitement in finding yourself in the wrong version of history, perhaps more so in tracing how things got to this point, and arguably the most of all in finding a way to get out of there.

 

Bishop quickly establishes some ground rules for Earth 2.0 with his generally backward British Empire in full swing. This soon expands into a police state in action, where even good people are so hopped up on propaganda that they’d sooner trust the television than their own senses. There’s a vivid sense of injustice to the whole thing, with Anji treated as less than a second-class citizen and Fitz instantly blamed for a terrorist act based on only circumstantial evidence. It’s a mean story that offers little respite, which perhaps gives it a certain edge.

 

Bishop’s structural choices also work in its favour. To start with he fills in narrative gaps while Anji sits under some rubble, letting us know how she got here and what led to the explosion. It helps raise and then keep the reader’s interest. (Fear Of The Dark is another recent example of this device, aka the Dreamworks “you’re probably wondering how I got here” opening.) Bishop then forgoes chapters, sequencing The Domino Effect in days with occasional cutaways to historical moments that helped shape the present, similar to how he wrote Amorality Tale. The text does a lot of “hop over here, hop over there” paragraph-breakage but we’re rarely away from one group long enough to forget them and the groups are mostly not so disparate that we can’t see a common purpose in the narrative. It all hares along nicely, aided by a generously-spaced font size that makes it easy and quick to read. The writing style helps with that too, hewing closer to an easily digestible Target novelisation than anything dense or difficult; the characters tend to say what they mean and their actions are followed very shortly by consequences.

 

The A-to-B simplicity of The Domino Effect is perhaps its greatest strength, but that only takes it so far. There is a lack of complex inner workings to these characters which cumulatively makes them less interesting, with the good being innocent until their unquestioning obedience kicks in and the bad just being consistently awful. Some are secretly double agents, but all that means is that they act completely outraged by the world around them until it’s suddenly time to twirl their figurative moustache and let us know how great it actually is to kill people and be awful all the time. Villains such as Hastings, who imprisons and tortures Fitz, would scarcely seem more dastardly if they tied helpless girls to train tracks. The dialogue suffers as a result, rendering all of these people into jolly one-note caricatures. “‘Get her to the hospital as quickly as possible. We can still save this one.’ ‘But she’s not one of us,’ one man replied. ‘Shouldn’t we save our own kind first?’” / “My men will be along shortly to beat a confession out of you.” What good is spending time with them if they don’t get progressively more interesting?

 

The same applies to the revised version of Earth. Bishop gets all of his weird details out of the way early: there’s no computers, British colonies are still a thing, there are authoritarian cops. Now what? Anji and the Doctor are still able to flit around the side-lines until they can achieve their meagre aims, visiting various safe houses and cafes. There isn’t much about this perverted history that couldn’t slot neatly into any number of real ones with a few alterations. The lack of computers is more of a thematic idea than a practical one, since a character can quite easily get through a novel without checking their emails or paying with a credit card – and as to the concept that not inventing them would ultimately lead to all of this, while I get that we’re all about domino effects here, really? The “Empire” concept might have worked better if the novel wasn’t set in England; with a pointed absence of non-white characters besides Anji there’s no way to input how things are going over in the colonies, what any of it means, if there’s any resistance there as well. There just isn’t a wider story to tell, especially when any remotely savvy reader knows that all of this is eventually destined for the timey wimey bin.

 

There’s scarcely any plot, while we’re at it. Once Fitz is unjustly arrested for the bombing of a tea-shop his lot in life becomes a series of jail cells and torture scenes until he gets rescued. Thrilling as it is to put him through a kangaroo court, narratively it’s a dead end since absolutely no one will listen to him, meaning it’s just “oh yes you did!” ad infinitum. What is there to enjoy about that, unless you’re particularly diverted by scenes where (for example) Fitz is battered so heavily that he vomits and soils himself on the same page?

 

Meanwhile Anji – who eventually generates enough brain-power to realise that She’s Not In Kansas Any More, thank goodness – attempts to lie low after being falsely exposed as a traitor, then eventually reunites with the Doctor. There’s nothing much for them to do besides locate Fitz and the TARDIS, which (in a particularly pathetic display of Doctoring) gets towed away while the Doctor clutches a receipt. The Domino Effect has Big Ideas about timelines, which Justin Richards mostly already came up with but hey ho, but in practice it’s just a series of moody bus or train journeys down to London whilst trying not to get shot. There’s a fairly heavy duty finale but that seems more interested in the books that will come after this one, which conveniently gets The Domino Effect off the hook for any sense of narrative closure. (You can tell as the remaining page-count dwindles that we’re not going to put all the toys away.)

 

It would be nice if there was some character development to cling onto, but it’s not really that sort of novel. Anji ought to be able to rail interestingly against her surroundings what with the racism, but that seems like a one-stop argument, with the people she speaks to either not caring (angrily) or not caring (apathetically). She seems artificially dippy at first thanks to the arc mismanagement, then later has some bizarre temper tantrums at the Doctor for suggesting that they carry out different missions, which just seemed like a random drama-grab. (“You’re planning to leave us both behind, aren’t you?” What the hell is she smoking? Isn’t it obvious that he’s probably got some plan in motion, and on the whole he’d rather Fitz wasn’t executed?) She has every right to be miserable in these surroundings but nothing particularly interesting comes of it.

 

The Doctor catches the same “fails to spot what’s going on here” disease as Anji at first, but he’s hardly a force to be reckoned with afterwards what with the TARDIS removal men. Bishop also brings in that popular trope of Doctorly fainting fits, linked in this one to the mistreatment of the TARDIS, but it’s still a terribly overplayed beat. He at least gets to face off against the villains in the end, offering his usual “you didn’t need to do that”s and telling them their actions are wrong even though they’re plainly not going to listen. But then they wheel out Sabbath – of course they do, it was practically in the BBC Charter at this point – and what do they do with him, even though technically this isn’t the same version of the character? The two characters debate whose approach to history is correct. Again. Only for it to turn out that Sabbath, despite his almighty confidence, has been a dithering prat and has missed the obvious. Again.

 

Bishop’s Sabbath writing is perhaps not the worst of the series thus far (The Infinity Race loses extra points for sheer weirdness) but despite his protestations that he is not “a power-crazed megalomaniac” the big silly villain shoe undeniably fits. We are well past the point of diminishing returns with this character and I will not miss him when and if he eventually sods off.

 

The only other thing to mention about The Domino Effect is the violence. It’s a fairly numbing experience after a while, with Fitz getting mistreated so badly I wondered how his brain was still working by the end. There are also background tragedies and sudden reversals peppered throughout, with Bishop introducing characters only to matter-of-factly kill them off. Several authors have been fond of this approach, perhaps seeking to suggest that anything can happen and thus heighten the drama. I don’t think it works if you keep doing it, with character after character getting a quick gunshot death as opposed to any justice or closure – you stop being surprised and start rolling your eyes. Special mention however ought to go to Alan Turing, whom Bishop puzzlingly resurrects only to imprison for sixty years, then bump off at the climax as part of a wildly confusing “nexus point” explanation for the arc reboot. I thought Paul Leonard’s treatment of the historical figure raised too many questions in The Turing Test, but at least that novel also asked questions about good and evil which placed all of it in a context. Parading him around this menagerie of cliches and technobabble only to kill him all over again just seems like poor taste.

 

The Domino Effect lost me early on, let’s face it. I don’t quite see how an ongoing series can work if it’s going to keep resetting its resets. As a novel in its own right this is blunt and clumsy stuff, easily readable but offering no great rewards for doing so. There is perhaps something to say about a world where history took a different course and what we can learn from that – plenty is going on today that echoes The Domino Effect – but I was left feeling that it had been said before in greater depth, and judging by the current trajectory of the series it will likely be said again before very long. Without Sabbath, if we are astonishingly lucky.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #124 – Fear Of The Dark by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#58

Fear Of The Dark

By Trevor Baxendale

I can see why they reprinted this one. Fear Of The Dark is a gloriously self-contained monster story: only the faintest idea of Doctor Who is needed to follow it, and even then Trevor Baxendale puts in enough little details about the three regulars that you could easily catch up.

Nyssa is having bad dreams. (So is Tegan to be fair, but that’s another story. Baxendale places this one just before her Mara relapse in Snakedance. These things are like buses, clearly.) A darkness is coming to get her, stirring up memories of Traken and her father’s death. It’s a very evocative, even disturbing start: “It inserted itself like a dark finger into the sheet … There was something in her room with her. Something that breathed … As the blemish crept up towards her, so the shadows gathered around her, above her, behind her … She sat, blind and paralysed with fear. Then something in the darkness touched her.”

This same force guides the TARDIS to a moon where they encounter a supposed archaeological dig. Of course the only thing that hard-nosed Stoker, gentle giant “Bunny” Cheung and their associates are looking for is wealth. They find unexpected signs of civilisation instead — doors in the dark — and soon, in true Doctor Who style, the bodies start piling up.

There are some fun little flourishes here, such as the way the Doctor and co. are already ensconced in the action from the start and then we pay out the scenes that led them there, or the fact that Stoker and co. don’t automatically suspect the TARDIS crew of any wrongdoing, mercifully allowing the story to get on with it rather than go the usual route with tedious false accusations. (Which would be era-appropriate if nothing else.) In the main though Fear Of The Dark is straight down the line storytelling, very easy to follow and positively relishing its A-to-B “who’s going to die next?” horror.

As to the horror elements, Baxendale is often one for body horror and there aren’t many opportunities for that here, with much quicker deaths sparing us the irradiated realities of The Janus Conjunction or the “see title” unpleasantness of Eater Of Wasps. There is still a monster on the loose and when we eventually see its vampiric attack (clearly he had “Stoker” on the brain) it’s a more brutally efficient one than any Nosferatu I’ve seen. A less corporeal monster lurks in the shadows and leans more into the spooky horror that would later inform the Vashta Nerada — however it’s still startlingly visceral up close, with one victim “breaking apart in the Doctor’s arms as his bones shattered and his skin tore. Blood gushed out like water over the cave floor.” There’s horrifying collateral damage as well, with one man getting horribly burnt in a spaceship crash but not dying right away, and another having his throat torn out.

The book isn’t like this cover to cover: it’s mostly a case of creeping around in the dark and worrying about what’s coming next. Baxendale does a good job of keeping up the tension, despite the plot essentially traipsing back and forth between the same few rooms and caves. There are neat little touches such as his likening a journey through a forest of stalagmites and stalactites to a shark’s ever-tightening jaws. And there are ways to unsettle the characters without monsters, such as mind games, as the psychic force wraps its tendrils around Nyssa (“I am always with you. Sleeping with you” — ick) and tortures people with visions and insecurities. I wasn’t certain how much of this was “The Dark” and how much was common or garden neuroses — not that such uncertainty is a bad thing. Nyssa and Tegan for example both have cause to suspect that the Doctor might prefer the other; Tegan’s observation seems particularly apt given her brief (at least from her perspective) absence from the TARDIS. This could be the Dark, or it could be occurring by itself. But then you’ve got upsetting dreams of Traken, an apparent future vision of Turlough, and one of the more revolting manifestations of regeneration in print, including a fairly accurate Sixth Doctor bursting out of his predecessor’s corpse.

Quite why the Dark wants to muck about psychically like this was never entirely clear to me, nor the reason that its coming would be a fate worse than death — in practical terms it still seems to be death, albeit a horrible one that perhaps takes a minute or so longer than say, a fatal gunshot wound. Baxendale puts a good deal of effort into the Dark’s oogly-boogly history, making it a compelling “horror from the dawn of time”, but when it comes to specifics (and crucially when it finally gets some dialogue) it’s prosaic territory, all “conquer the universe” and “you will die, Doctor!” Fear Of The Dark is on much more effective ground when it’s getting under its characters’ skins, for instance Tegan remembering a hated old tree that would tap at her bedroom window only to notice something much less benign doing the same thing now.

The characters are a fairly solid bunch, with a strained but believable romance coming through for two estranged lovers-turned-enemies. Some minor figures barely manifest beyond their first names (“Jim” and “Nik” mainly register for their failed attempts to creep on Tegan and Nyssa) while others endear themselves very nicely, only to get aggravatingly killed off anyway because it’s just that sort of “bloodbath” story. (Although let’s face it, anyone saying “All I know is that when this operation’s over, I’m off back to Earth and my family for good” is marked for death.) There’s also a pseudo-antagonist who might have rather more benign intentions than you suspect at first, but insists on behaving like a complete a-hole anyway, presumably to throw the reader off the scent. His righteous indignation later on doesn’t convince.

Baxendale has a good grasp of the Season Twenty crew at the centre of it all, observing that the Fifth Doctor “was hiding something behind all that courtesy.” Fear Of The Dark pushes him towards that “gentleman running out of patience” manner we saw at the end of his run, especially when he demonstrates why live rounds would be a mistake in pitch darkness. There’s a sure to be contentious moment when he feels so hemmed in by the Dark that he considers a murder-suicide bid, but there’s enough ambiguity to suggest that it’s not entirely his choice. (Elsewhere Tegan notes that “It wasn’t like him to be so taciturn” and side character Stoker clocks something that “didn’t sound like the Doctor at all.”) I don’t think the Fifth Doctor’s occasional coldness here is based on nothing at all, but this is clearly an attempt to push it to breaking point.

That aforementioned competitiveness simmers between Tegan and Nyssa, which I thought was a clever and unexplored area; the famously grouchy Tegan ought to show some signs of actually wanting to be here after her return in Arc Of Infinity, and her insecurity here highlights that nicely. Baxendale still has a bit of fun needling her temper and argumentativeness, such as: “‘How about you, Tegan? How have you been feeling?’ ‘Now you mention it, I’ve been feeling pretty irritable and cranky ever since we arrived.’ ‘As I said, it doesn’t seem to be affecting you very much at all.’” But what I mostly took from it was a sense of “what can she do now that she’s back,” which seemed a smart choice at this precise point in her telly run.

Nyssa is perhaps the casualty of the three. For much of the book she falls under the Dark’s influence, albeit in an “if you know, you know” way rather than cackling maniacally, which is a subtle little thread worth highlighting. Other characters forever seem to be asking how she’s feeling, and she’s generally feeling pretty lousy, which takes her out of the action to some extent; when what we have left is knowingly ambiguous viz “alien influence” there isn’t a lot of room to get a feel for Nyssa’s actual character. Even the Traken nightmares don’t take us very far into her psyche, as we’re simply not asking about that stuff very much.

Ah well. It’s still interesting to be asking any questions about Nyssa’s inner turmoil which so often went unexplored on screen, and we do a bit, like when Tegan observes that a young girl’s father has been murdered by an evil force and Nyssa thinks the girl might be better off never knowing about it. Fear Of The Dark is so focussed on its grim rewards that it felt like a treat to get these character moments at all — from the outset it seems like the sort of story that will throw the lot of them in the mincer, Horror Of Fang Rock style. As with a lot of horror it’s somewhat machine-like but undeniably well-oiled.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #123 – The Infinity Race by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#61

The Infinity Race

By Simon Messingham

Expectation strikes again.

Picture the scene. You’ve just finished Time Zero, a book that ends in (and some would argue is written entirely in support of) a big change to the status quo. The timelines are in such a mess that Anji can’t go home — there’s an actual reason for it this time! — and the gang needs Sabbath’s help to fix it. It’s one of the more “oh no, now what!” cliffhangers in the range. In the same literary breath Justin Richards keys up The Infinity Race, Sabbath’s next port of call and ditto the TARDIS. The two things must be connected. Right?

Wrong. The Infinity Race includes a bit of lip service to the Time Zero situation, with Anji half-heartedly wondering if “the shake-up [at the end of this story] had got reality back on the right track,” but otherwise the only forward motion in this arc is the Doctor telling Sabbath about the latest mess he’s got everybody into. The Infinity Race is its own thing — which isn’t technically a problem, but then Time Zero really made it sound like there was some urgency to this crisis, only for us to immediately be told no, apparently it can be put on ice for a while. It’s a frustrating editorial choice.

In fairness that’s probably what it was. Simon Messingham could easily have written an EDA to slot in anywhere, needing only the core trio, Sabbath and yet another batty plan of his to control the timelines. It certainly reads like some arc references were sprinkled in later. We’re better off viewing it as entirely its own thing, or at least as its own Sabbath-era EDA that has no other particular place to be.

The story has some promise, or at least the setting does. Selonart is a planet almost entirely comprised of water. The only sign of life or culture on it (apart from some apparently indigenous people of dubious origin) is a regatta held every five years. Local society seems to exist mostly to support that, with many colourful and in all likelihood dangerous parties coming to Selonart just to compete. Into this mix comes the TARDIS crew finding a mostly abandoned boat, dead bodies, some sort of wraith, a friendly if monosyllabic native called Bloom and some inexplicable ice that makes you very ill to touch it. The Doctor and co. barely survive the boat exploding, but they lose the TARDIS and get blamed for all the destruction and deaths on board.

Now, about that promise — which obviously doesn’t include losing the TARDIS or getting falsely accused of murder, good lord not those again. I think there’s something to a (probably awful) cruise ship culture and a (no doubt dangerous) boat race full of wild characters, but The Infinity Race doesn’t do much with either. The race is a complete wash, happening mostly off-screen with interchangeable crews only to get curtailed for plot reasons anyway. We never get a firm sense of the business-as-usual on Selonart either before that all goes apocalyptically pear-shaped. The only people we meet there are lacking in the personality department: the best we get are a pompous governor, a cruel recruiter who press-gangs Fitz and later somewhat improbably becomes his love interest, and a vaguely mysterious officer with a mission that involves the Doctor and Sabbath, which would be very interesting if anyone bothered to talk about it at length. None of them are missed in the end, and the rest are just screams in a crowd. Who cares? There’s no sense of what is at stake here or if there’s any reason to be bothered about losing Selonart in its current configuration — certainly not compared to Storm Harvest, which already did the “decadent human culture imprints on a mostly-water planet at their peril” thing, even down to the mysterious indigenous people.

The indigenous people should probably be where The Infinity Race sets itself apart, but as for that, oh dear. The idea isn’t bad, especially where it ends up going, and the initial germ even recalls the beleaguered Tharils from Warriors’ Gate: beings with a unique link to their environment that are enslaved by humans to aid their guidance systems. It’s considerably less developed than in that TV story, however, with only a cursory demonstration of their mistreatment on boats followed by wholesale racism once society breaks down. Bloom isn’t the only one we meet but he might as well be for all the flavours of personality on display, although to be fair this sort of becomes plot relevant. The writing for Bloom though is all grunty, monosyllabic English — think Robin the caveman in Ghosts — until his high evolution ending when, quite apart from all the plot stuff happening to him, his English improves. Hmm. Not great, is it?

Simon Messingham can do complex space cultures (see Zeta Major) and he can get in the heads of his characters. I’m not sure what happened this time, as all of that seems to backfire. His use of first person narration, which worked so brilliantly in Tomb Of Valdemar, falls over here. It’s inconsistent, only giving us Anji, Fitz and Bloom’s perspectives, defaulting to third person elsewhere, but also sometimes for Bloom as well. The third person stuff seems to have some personality bleed-through from the other bits, with odd little declarations like “We return to the Governor to find him much more relaxed than of late” and “For those interested in such things, Bloom’s effect on the race was instantaneous.” To whom is anyone, omniscient or Anji etc, telling this story? Sometimes the characters are trying so hard for casual real-person-ness that the actual information starts drying up: “I remember Fitz’s torch and him shouting something.” / “As far as I recall…” / “I was lying on a mattress or something…” / “Someone had pressed a switch or something.” Or what? Why are we asking you if you don’t know?

There is a general insouciance to the narration, whoever’s doing it, that suggests this vagueness is all deliberate and The Infinity Race is a comedy. Trouble is, there aren’t any jokes: the whole thing is just a wee bit irreverent in a slightly irritating way, with lots of lines like “The Captain thought for a minute. A very long minute (and I’ve known some long minutes in my time),” “I was itching to get out. I would have said dying but that was what we were trying to avoid” and “‘Yeah, you’re losing me now.’ I am nothing if not honest.” Fitz comes in handy here, greeting us (who are “we”?) with an occasional “Hi folks” but also sometimes lampshading the inadequacies of the plot: “I can hear you. Hear you sighing as you think: not again, how many times? One boat to another, cells, backwards and forwards all over the place. It’s wearing a bit thin, isn’t it?” Nyurgh. Really?

There are also — and I’m getting proper picky now, sorry — some rather “red pen” bits that compromise the whole thing further. “One of the head-setted technicians, Ingham, suddenly looked up sharply from his display.” / “We found the first body in the first room.” / “I would definitely have gladly gone back there now.” Some of this is in first person, so you could say that the narrator was a bit redundant on purpose. But it’s still part of the book.

The real problem though is the character writing. None of the voices are quite right. The Doctor fares the best, despite an occasionally too awed perspective on Sabbath that goes against the (recent) grain (“a man of many parts. To be honest, I don’t know how many parts. Extraordinary fellow” ???) and a conveniently functional memory for alien cultures. (I thought info dumps were why we got rid of all that in the first place?) He has an impressive moment in the epilogue, facing off against a city of wraiths, and he essentially kills Sabbath at one point (though of course he recovers), which you could argue is a natural progression from the last few books. He also gets inarguably the best scene in The Infinity Race, manipulating time with the help of Bloom to replay the same scene thrice over, including walking it back to become less omnipotent.

Fitz mostly suffers from context. There is no sign of the adventuring he did so recently in Time Zero (this story takes place immediately afterwards) or any effect that might have had on his personality: he’s just the same happy-go-lucky yutz Sam met all those years ago, complete with a now somewhat rare love interest, a woman who has vowed to kill him. It’s all surface level stuff, a step back from the last few books.

Anji is worse. Messingham recognises some aspects of her personality — the annoyance with Fitz, the pragmatism — but he otherwise casts her as an irritating smarm, plaguing the Doctor with questions and interjecting all the time. She shoulders most of the “funny” comments in this. Again we miss important context from prior novels, lightly referencing her eighteen months back at her old job and decision to leave the TARDIS but not really reckoning with how it feels to be back in the thick of it anyway. Or really recognising the fact that she likes the Doctor and Fitz now. The rapport is another big step back: I found her so annoying that I couldn’t grasp the Doctor’s patience and affection for her. It all just feels like Standard Anji, with continuity links used instead of earned character growth.

And then there’s Sabbath. Structurally this is all the usual stuff, effectively doing for Control The Timeline plans what the Master was doing for random power grabs in Season 8, aka always having another one to run off to next week. This makes him and his plans seem more trivial in the moment — especially his pointless reliance on pseudonyms and disguises, seriously who is all that for — but again, that’s just his default editorial setting and not Messingham’s fault. The voice, though. Sabbath is a somewhat taciturn fellow, by no means dull but not someone who can be bothered to waste energy humouring people. He doesn’t make friends easily. Cut to The Infinity Race and it’s like he’s hosting a tea party! All of a sudden he’s avuncular and cheerful, coming out with things like “Doctor, please do get up off the floor. You’ll do yourself a mischief” and “Anji? Put the kettle on, would you my darling?” At one point he introduces himself by paraphrasing a song from The Wizard Of Oz. If you wanted to do a double rug-pull and reveal that Suspicious Large Gentleman is actually Sabbath, then reveal that he’s someone else entirely, this would be the way.

He’s not putting on a great showing with the plot stuff either, mystifyingly expecting the Doctor to go along with his mad plan of the week and then defaulting to the usual stroppy anti-moral grandstanding when he’s denied. When things kick off Messingham takes some delight in knocking him down a peg, which is something I’ve enjoyed about recent EDAs, but it’s done a bit clumsily here with Sabbath begging for his life, offering up other people as sacrifices and generally “[screaming] like a woman.” Embarrassing in several ways. Something tells me he’ll be back to his less sugar-high self the next time we see him in, oh, one book’s time probably.

The Infinity Race has a decent idea to do with Bloom and his people, which conceptually echoes what’s happening back on Earth. This link might be a coincidence for all its actual relevance here but the concept is still neat. (As for the “happy ending” of the remaining Selonart denizens being brought into Bloom’s way of being, agree to disagree. It sounds a bit like hell and it certainly wasn’t consensual.) The book seems uncertain of its tone otherwise, aiming for a light-hearted romp but forgetting to fill the space with anyone we’d actually enjoy hearing from, defaulting to the companions and (however inexplicably) Sabbath in that regard. It feels like a fusion of Messingham’s earlier approaches that doesn’t quite come off, not helped by its place in a newly developed arc that makes it feel even more maddeningly inconsequential.

5/10

PS: Props for remembering that Sabbath’s ship is crewed by apes. The boys are back in town! Until they’re swept overboard. (I’m sure they’re fine.)